Why doesn the Census of Agriculture use sampling?
The Statistics Act requires that a census of all farm operations in Canada be conducted every five years. Since a census is, by definition, every farm operation, sampling only a portion of operations would not honour the Act nor would it provide the complete picture a census can. The Census of Agriculture is the primary source for small-area data and for survey sampling, and it is important that each agricultural operation complete a Census of Agriculture questionnaire, regardless of size or geographic location. Samples are used for making agriculture estimates between census years.
